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Sport is increasingly being used by individuals, charities, and corporate sponsors as a means of acquiring donors and fundraisers to support a variety of social and health causes. This paper examines five key features of fitness philanthropy that when considered together provide new sociological insight into a unique social phenomenon. These are: (a) peer-to-peer giving, (b) social media accounts of embodied philanthropy, (c) community connection and making a difference, (d) fitness philanthropy as social capital, and (e) charity and corporate giving. The significance of the paper is threefold. First, it highlights the ways in which fitness philanthropy points to the changing nature of sport, leisure, and physical activity, whereby fundraising is a key motivation for participation. Second, it examines the types of “empathy paths” created by fitness philanthropy with its emphasis on the body, social media, and peer-to-peer forms of organizational giving. Third, the paper seeks to answer critical questions about fitness philanthropy in the context of neoliberalism and “caring capitalism.” Bringing these themes into dialogue with broader research on the intersections between sport and charity adds to the body of sociological research on sport, philanthropy, well-being, and civic engagement by addressing novel conceptual frameworks for the embodied expression of these concerns.

Since the concept of redeveloping Wrigley Field became prevalent, the Chicago Tribune has notably constructed a variety of narrative strands on related urban dynamics. Through a framework that connected post-Gramsci insights of hegemony, discourse, and critics of spatial and economic neoliberalism, this study examined how the newspaper strategically assembled discourses in mediatizing urban politics surrounding the Wrigley renovation. First, the newspaper fostered hegemonic consent that endorsed the redevelopment(s) by promoting old tropes of economic development and market growth despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Second, it also produced a parallel discourse that expressed moderate recognition and sympathy to the interest and experience of the community. Without fundamentally challenging neoliberal power, however, such discursive construction was a strategic and instrumental intervention that reinforced the contingencies and boundaries of neoliberal hegemony. Through such investigations, this study shed light on the ongoing rearticulation(s) of the media regime that strategically produced neoliberal rationalities, subjectivities, and discursive antagonism as it assisted to shape urban imageries and political economies of sporting spaces.

Women have been entering the sports journalism industry in growing numbers around the world but are still oftentimes sidelined. Female sport media workers constantly face more challenges than their male counterparts because of unfriendly working environments and conditions based in sexism. Most of the existing research has been conducted in Anglo-Saxon environments; yet, women’s inclusion and exclusion in the sport industry is an international problem. This case study expands the literature through in-depth interviews with the only two Ghanaian journalists who covered the FIFA World Cup 2018. These two Ghanaians, the only representatives of their country in the media in Russia, were women, a unique situation that deserved to be examined to better understand the place of women in sport media.

In contrast to the sex-segregated model that dominates sport and contributes to its tradition of hegemonic masculinity, collegiate track and field typically follows a sex-integrated structure whereby men and women train, travel, and compete together. In this article, the authors examined how six collegiate male track-and-field athletes who are part of a sex-integrated team navigate gendered norms and hierarchies with a particular focus on their understandings of gender(ed) performance and abilities. Grounded in a feminist poststructuralist framework, the authors’ analysis found that although the participants were accepting of a sex-integrated training environment and challenged some gender stereotypes and instances of sexism, they simultaneously reified these same gender stereotypes by characterizing women athletes as “emotional” or “less competitive” and advocated individual solutions to institutional sexism.

This study content analyzed 1,013 thumbnails of news episodes at the Olympic Channel through the lens of gender. By examining the percentage of pictures rendered to male and female athletes, themes, sports type, sexualization, subordination, and action level, this study uncovered that although some sex differences existed, the Olympic Channel—overall—showcased a high level of gender equality in visualizing male and female athletes in news thumbnails, especially considering that the pictures analyzed were collected from daily-based media coverage. This study is one of the first to explore gender differences in a media platform established by the International Olympic Committee, with implications outlined.

In April 2016, TSN (The Sports Network), one of Canada’s most prominent broadcasting stations, aired a documentary miniseries, Radical Play, that describes how European organizations are “harnessing sport to prevent isolated Muslim youth from joining extremist groups.” The documentary focuses on Younes, a 17-year-old refugee in Hamburg, Germany, who has been recruited to participate in a deradicalization program run through a local boxing gym. This article offers a contextualized reading of Radical Play that explores how the problem of radicalization is constructed in the Canadian context, how sport is positioned in relation to deradicalization projects, and how deeply held beliefs about Muslim boys and men are communicated to Canadians through sporting discourses.

In this manuscript, the author describes their unexpected grieving process in dealing with the death of Kobe Bryant. In particular, the author focuses on the mourning process on tragic celebrity deaths and the relationship between celebrity, mortality, and the ways in which people make sense of themselves through celebrity figures. The author attempts to highlight the complicated nature of mourning celebrity figures who are not personally known, especially those that have a complicated history in the public eye. The author moves into and through their own personal experiences as a Black man in order to make sense of public mourning, race, and the Black Masculinity of Kobe Bryant.